Saturday, March 5, 2016

Monkey Steers Wheelchair With It's Little Monkey Mind

He's quite a show-off but the research is probably going to get him a Nobel sometime this decade.
From Gizmodo:

Researchers have developed a wireless brain
interface that allows monkeys to control the movements of a robotic
wheelchair using their thoughts alone. The breakthrough suggests that
similar interfaces could allow severely paralyzed individuals to
navigate all sorts of robotic devices with their minds.

Prior to this study, researchers used brain-machine-interfaces (BMIs) to help primates control artificial limbs.
But as this new research shows, it’s also possible to take the
recordings from cortical implants and use them to facilitate whole-body
movement. Though the new research was geared towards the movements of a
wheelchair, the findings strongly suggest that more sophisticated
robotic devices could be controlled via BMIs, while requiring no
physical intervention whatsoever. The details of this work can now be found in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

The new study, headed by brain interface expert Miguel Nicolelis
from Duke Health, is the first to succeed at using BMIs for whole body
locomotion. By implanting a wireless, high throughput multi-channel
device in the brains of monkeys, the researchers demonstrated that the
animals can learn to roam freely with an electronic wheelchair using
about 300 neurons. The device allowed them to imagine a trajectory from
moment-to-moment and navigate towards a target using the wireless
connection.

The experiment is part of Nicolelis’s Walk Again Project,
which is geared towards technologies that can read the brain waves of
paralyzed people and translate them into signals that can control
artificial limbs and other assistive devices....MUCH MORE